...and raise you Hanuman?

OK, it didn't go down in exactly that fashion, but Obama carrying around a small good luck charm in Hanuman's image has India going ga-ga. I'm sure he didn't realize the significance of it, and of course at some point someone in McCain's camp will try to label him as a pagan idol-worshiper. And then will that insult result in Indian-Americans fleeing to the Democrats in droves? What's that? Their only religion is money? Oh...

So what does this mean for Obama? Is he steadily taking up his position as the anti-Bush? Clearly, he is becoming increasingly popular around the world, and this can only mean an improvement of America's international image down the road.

By the way, for all that Bush-McCain talk about not negotiating with your enemies, in the end they found diplomacy an apt solution to at least one of their problems.

The Behenc******s.
Inspired by this
Clearly having such names is not good for marketing purposes. But perhaps in a perverse way, it is.
At any rate, I can use an expletive from a language other than English as the name of my band, and while staying true to my punk ethos can still be marketable. cool. The behenchutiyas it is.

Get on a treadmill, fat-ass!

OK, that was a bit harsh. However, the CDC has been reporting that about a third of the USA is obese. It has also been reported in the past that every hundred pound decrease in the load your car carries can increase fuel efficiency by about 2%. So, with apologies to "Big & Rich", save some gas, ride a treadmill! You want to wean yourself off foreign oil dependence? Wean yourself off of McDonald's first.

Obviously, I was just trying to be facetious (except about McDonald's). Here's that helpful website regarding better fuel economy, including the info from above. I also found this interesting study by a couple of guys at Duke's Fuqua School of Business on finding better ways to express fuel economy. The savings on gas between cars that get 10 mpg versus those that get 25 mpg over 10,000 miles is pretty staggering.

Next time I'll look at whether $4 dollars/gallon is actually a gift, rather than a burden, for the American people.

Wanted to do a piece on rock music in India for some time. Might as well start off with this.
Much like everywhere else, rock music first find its place amongst alienated and disgruntled (yes, the favt. word of this blog) youth . In this case, the people from the Northeast.

When I was a strapping young lad during my undergrad days in Delhi, the biggest set of rock music fans were people from the northeastern states. If anything, if you were from the northeast, you had to be in with Pink Floyd, Metallica and black/death metal bands - that was considered the norm and anything else (like listening to Bollywood tunes) was an anomaly, an aberration.
And yes all of them strummed a guitar, even the birds. At that time I figured they were into rock music because the northeast was so far from Bollywood, and didn't have any representation in Bollywood, that they were in any case different and needed to find something to latch onto to create a common identity, and that 'something' was rock music and the entire rock culture.

But from the article that doesn't seem to be the case. They only want to be cool, thats all.

Scouring the post-NBA finals media coverage over the last few days, I've noticed a disturbing new trend: bashing of Euro Basketball players. For instance, the Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy, slipped in this gem in his finals recap: "Kobe Bryant scored 22 for the losers, but ultimately LA just had too many Europeans."

Too many Europeans? Is that a legitimate way to criticize the failures of the Los Angeles Lakers to appropriately compete in the NBA finals, particularly from such an accomplished columnist? This isn't limited to Shaughnessy, either. ESPN's Colin Cowherd, one of my favorites, has repeatedly ripped European NBA players and the Euro lifestyle in general, labeling them as soft as a result of the supposedly cushier living conditions (El Subliminal can better attest to this).

I'm all for freedom of speech, and certainly the Lakers deserved to be criticized for their poor effort throughout the series, particularly in game 6, but such blanket statements amount to racism, don't they? If such similar statements had been made about African American players, the public outrage would not be contained, and guys like Shaughnessy would probably be suspended or fired. In fact, see the backlash after former Green Bay Packer's great Paul Hornung uttered these comments. And we're just over a year removed from the Don Imus controversy. At any rate, I don't think this substitutes for actual game analysis, and we should expect better from sports opinion columns (or should we?).

Word.
While I generally detest Scoop's writing, this one time I have to give him credit. Got a nice one in for KG.

Enjoy your moment, KG. You deserved it. Its nice to know good guys sometimes get their due.

I've always wondered why sports fans in certain places are so much more passionate than others, why sports, and particularly following sports, weighs more heavily on some people's minds than others. After all culturally, Americans are relatively (to European and Asian cultures) homogeneous; and yet there are geographical differences in their behavioral patterns. I don't have the background to do a psychological or sociological analysis, and my observations are somewhat un-scientific, but I think sports obsession can essentially be correlated with the local climate.

Having lived in the United States for the majority of my life, having traveled the country's length and breadth, and having followed the history of sports in the US fairly closely, I feel comfortable in speculating where the most passionate, obsessive sports fans live. In my experience, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and other nearby big cities are the homes of teams considered to have the most impassioned sports fans. Through thick and thin, winning seasons and losing seasons alike, the fans in these cities are considered to stick by their teams and players. I've spent extensive time in about half on those, and I can speculate that this is probably true. You could probably through Seattle into that mix.

Conversely, the cities where fans are considered to be fair-weather and fickle, are places like Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and towns in those locales. Dallas fans are rather famous in this regard. Similarly, Los Angeles, the country's largest media market, couldn't sustain enough interest to keep an NFL team in town, despite that league's rise to the most popular in the country. In fact, LA lost both its football teams, both of which have been fairly successful since departing town.

So what's the constant theme here? The weather, of course. Where the temperature is colder, where the winters are harsher, and where people are more often confined to their homes due to inclement weather conditions, the fans tend to be more obsessive (i.e. true sports fans). I don't blame them. After all, when your favorite teams are losing, and you're stuck at home, I can envision scenarios where the gloom and doom weighs you down more. Consequently, I think the successes of their sports teams weigh more heavily on their minds. These folks don't have a lot of distractions.

On the other hand, in cities with warmer weather, where folks can get out more, the fans tend to have more perspective. After all, with all the distractions, what incentive would fans have to follow a poor sports team? If the Lakers didn't have Kobe Bryant and constantly finished in the bottom half of the standings, would fans fight traffic to get to the Staples Center and watch games? Or would they rather take the trouble to go to LA's numerous beaches and enjoy the sea and sun? That's what I thought. I think people in these towns are also able to deal with sports disappointments better, because of all the distractions. On the other hand, when the teams do well, attending games becomes a hip, trendy thing to do, a place to be seen, and that's usually what games in LA or Dallas are like when the teams are winning. On top of that, I think there is a greater percentage of transplants out west, and they feel less loyalty to the local sports teams and would tend not to go unless, again, there was some social impact or quality experience to be had by attending.

So where the weather is fairer, the fans tend to be more fair-weather (I wonder if that is the origin of that phrase), but is that such a bad thing? And which would you rather be, and where would you rather live? Of course, you're welcome to poke holes in these arguments.